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Forum:New feature - Discussions
Hey Zeldapedia! I'm here to give you a heads-up about , a new feature that we're currently rolling out to more and more communities. Here's a short overview, in case you haven't heard of it yet: Discussions is a forum-like conversation space that works equally well in a desktop browser, mobile browser, and in our . With communities that already have Discussions, we've seen a big influx in new members for the community who signed up just so they could use Discussions and talk to other users about their favorite game. It made the wiki accessible for a lot of users who loved the topic, and enjoyed the articles, but couldn't quite find their niche to contribute before. Instead of giving you a lengthy description, I suggest checking out Fallout Discussions as an example to see what Discussions is like: http://fallout.wikia.com/d/f We will be enabling Discussions for Zeldapedia shortly. Since Breath of the Wild is coming out in March, and you already have a popular community app, we expect Discussions to become quite active. In December there were over 6000 English-speaking users in the app. (Your French counterparts have had Discussions for a while, too!) This could be an opportunity for you to reach new potential members and to grow the community even before the release of the game. If some experienced community members are willing to keep an eye on the new space and post good content at the beginning, leading by example, that'll help make this a valuable new addition to the wiki. Admins and moderators in this community will have in Discussions as well. You can lock and delete threads, undelete them, see posts that users have flagged as inappropriate, and customize your own guidelines for Discussions, for example, and we're still working on adding more moderation features. Are you or any of the other current admins and mods interested in moderating Discussions, once it's set up? If you don't have the time to add this to your duties, Fandom will help out and we can work together to look for responsible, active candidates among the new Discussions users, and promote them to moderators. Some Discussions users may not even edit the wiki (many only visit it via the app), but we've seen Discussions-only users do a very good job at moderating. Other communities have chosen to go that route, with a Discussions-only group of moderators, some have a mix of experienced wiki editors and new Discussions users moderating, and some just expanded their regular moderation to include the Discussions conversations. Please let me know if you have any questions about this! We're happy to address any concerns you might have, and to help you set up a moderation team for Discussions, if you're up to it! -BertH (help forum | blog) 23:58, January 17, 2017 (UTC) :Do you know when exactly this feature will be implemented here? Green Rupee 06:30, January 18, 2017 (UTC) ::Discussions became enabled in the iOS Zelda Community app yesterday, and Android will follow soon. There is already one post, with some replies! http://zelda.wikia.com/d/f/ Perhaps you're open to posting a welcome message there? There is now a link on the wiki navigation as well. I know this has happened quickly, but as I said, Fandom staff will be keeping an eye on things. We'll probably upload some graphics to the desktop layout very soon, but any admin can update those at any time (see the help page I linked above, for details). -BertH (help forum | blog) 14:09, January 18, 2017 (UTC) :::I've gone ahead and made a short welcome post on the discussions themselves, as well as noted the new feature in the community messages. Might as well make use of the feature now that we have it! :::EDIT: Now that I've used it a bit, I do have a question: it looks like Wikitext doesn't work in posts or replies. Are there any plans to include that (so that, for example, I could italicize game names or link to articles here on the Wiki)? —'Ceiling Master' 01:45, January 19, 2017 (UTC) :::::Right now there is no markup or rich text formatting of any kind. We are working to determine how the more feature-rich editor will work, and so the extent to which we will support wikitext markup is not yet clear. You'll be able to use italics in the future, though. You can make links right now, though. If you paste in the full URL of an article it will render as a clickable link, and also will get a nicely formatted "link card" with an image. In the community app, that same link will actually display as just the article name, linked (without the rest of the URL) and so will look a little more seamless. Discussions is in active development and you can read a bit more at which is due for another update soon. We have more features on the way and we definitely want to hear about what's working for you and what's not, as you continue to use it. -BertH (help forum | blog) 01:56, January 19, 2017 (UTC)